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Wednesday, June 28, 2006

For Labour, all roads lead to Manchester

The Daily Telegraph believes he's now ready to go next year. Meanwhile the Grauniad says he wants to thrash out a new private understanding with Gordon Brown over the timing of the handover. Nick Robinson ain't convinced, and reckons "events" might yet come to his rescue.

So does all this tell us anything new about Tony Blair's political future? Well, the triple by-lines on the two broadsheet tales suggest to me a slight hedging of bets, perhaps...?

The one thing most pundits seem to agree on though is that the thing needs to be sorted out by the time of Labour's conference in Manchester this September, or risk that event turning into a media shambles dominated by speculation about the succession.

Here's what I wrote on this particular issue in the Manchester-based North-West Enquirer a week ago

"For the Labour Party now, it seems all roads are pointing to Manchester, where this year’s annual conference will take place - the first to be held at a non-seaside venue for many years.

"The pattern of Labour conferences in recent years has been a big speech by Brown on the Monday, setting out his vision and leadership credentials, followed by a defiant message from Blair on the Tuesday that he’s here to stay.

"It won’t work this time round. Everyone knows Blair is going, and Brown has made too many leader-in-waiting speeches for another one to be taken seriously.

"Hence it is my hunch that the Prime Minister will not be able to leave Manchester without being forced to do the one thing he most wants to avoid: to name the date for his departure."

The Guardian story suggests that Blair still wants to avoid giving a public commitment by reaching a private understanding with Brown. But once it is obvious that such a private understanding has been reached, it will also be obvious that Blair is going next year.

In this context, Tim Montgomerie of Conservative Home has set up this site where visitors can log their predictions of the Prime Minister's exact departure date, with the chance to win £500.

I won't be entering myself because, as a journalist, I don't believe in betting on political outcomes which you might have to write about and which you might thereby be in a position to influence in some small way.

That said, I'm happy to accede to Tim's request to add the link for anyone else who wants to try their luck.

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"He saw politics very much like Trollope, as the interplay of personalities seeking preferment, rather than, like me, as a conflict of principles and programmes about social and economic change."

Denis Healey, writing about Roy Jenkins in "The Time of My Life."

"I'll tell you what happens with impossible promises. You start with a series of far-fetched resolutions, and these are then pickled into a rigid dogma, a code. And you go through the years sticking to that, outdated, misplaced, irrelevant to the real needs, and you end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour council, a Labour council, hiring taxis to scuttle round the city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers. I'll tell you - and you'll listen - you can't play politics with people's jobs and with people's homes and with people's services."

Neil Kinnock, Bournemouth 1985

"But the most eloquent message concerns the Blair government. It must be right at all times. Above all, the integrity of the leader can never be challenged. He never did hype up intelligence. He didn't take Britain to war on any other than the stated terms. Any suggestion of half-truth, or disguised intention, or concealed Bushite promises is the most disgraceful imaginable charge that deserves a state response that knows no limit.

"That's how a sideshow came to take over national life. Now it seems to have taken a wretched, guiltless man's life with it. Such is the dynamic that can be unleashed by a leader who believes his own reputation to be the core value his country must defend."

Hugo Young, on the death of Dr David Kelly, 2003

"The socialism I believe in is everyone working for each other, everyone having a share of the rewards. It's the way I see football, the way I see life."